Drama, in German, in the Shadow of ‘Leopoldtstadt’

MUNICH — “My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner,” boasts a character in Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” summing up the rapid trajectory from piety to cultural assimilation that was common among Vienna’s Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Stoppard’s play, which is running through March at the Longacre Theater in New York, is one of the season’s most discussed productions. In it, the veteran dramatist, veering into explicitly Jewish territory for the first time in his long and decorated career, explores the themes of social integration and the limits of tolerance that made the “Jewish question” one of the flash points of modernity.

Seventy years before Stoppard’s fictional Merz family graced the stage, Gabriele Tergit published “The Effingers,” a 900-page novel that traces the fortunes of a Jewish family in Germany over four generations, from 1878 to 1948. Tergit, a German Jewish writer and journalist whose long life spanned much of the 20th century (she died in 1982, in London, at age 88), has undergone a reappraisal recently. When “The Effingers” was reissued in 2019, it became a literary event in Germany; the book was compared to Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” and even won praise from the country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. (An English translation, by Sophie Duvernoy, is coming from New York Review Books.)

The Münchner Kammerspiele, whose recent programming has highlighted works by unsung female artists, has lost no time in bringing “The Effingers” to the stage. Jan Bosse’s nearly four-hour production is dramatically fluid and visually striking. Aside from the historically accurate costumes, whose changing styles help us keep track of the passage of time, Bosse and his stage designer, Stéphane Laimé, serve us a sleek and spare production that incorporates written and projected dates, historical photographs, family trees and, in one particularly amusing sequence, a car ride in a model manufactured by the Effinger family (brought to life with a green screen).

The dozen actors who play the family members, and their friends and enemies, are largely plucked from the Kammerspiele’s permanent ensemble. Among the best are Katharina Bach as the beautiful, artistically talented and doomed Sofie Oppner: Bach invests the character with a blend of charisma, flamboyance and mental instability. Zeynep Bozbay is warm and convincing as Marianne Effinger, who rejects her arriviste family’s lavish lifestyle by devoting herself to charity. She waits in vain for a marriage proposal from one of her brother’s friends; when they meet again, decades later, he has become a convinced antisemite.

Yet despite the fine acting and the bold staging, “The Effingers” rarely ignites onstage. Unlike the book, the performing version by Bosse and dramaturge Viola Hasselberg ends before World War II, perhaps to avoid suggesting a sense of tragic inevitability for a family of affluent Berliners who just happen to be Jewish. Though the production teems with life, it also lacks focus and narrative direction. Keeping up with the large, at times chaotic, Effinger clan over a half-century is not consistently rewarding. Perhaps a more judicious selection of scenes would have yielded a more dramatically and emotionally satisfying play. Or maybe a slimmed-down cast (such as in the three-actor tour de force that is “The Lehman Trilogy,” another Jewish family saga) would have resulted in a less cluttered and more absorbing production.

“The Effingers,” an epic literary adaptation, is unusual repertoire for the Kammerspiele, where more experimental, chamber-like productions dominate these days. Large casts and extra-long running times, by contrast, are common features down the block at the Residenztheater, which boasts the largest acting ensemble in Germany. This season, dramatic epics like “Angels in America” and “The Inheritance” share the program with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “The Tower.” The Austrian Jewish Hofmannsthal, a leading literary figure in fin-de-siècle Vienna, is also one of Stoppard’s touchstones for recreating that period in “Leopoldstadt,” and comes in for high praise in a monologue extolling how Viennese Jews worship culture. “A new writer, if he’s a great poet like Hofmannsthal, walks among us like a demigod,” Stoppard has a character say.

Nora Schlocker’s grim, aesthetically distinctive but dramatically stilted production of “The Tower” illustrates some of the difficulties of bringing Hofmannsthal’s work to the stage nowadays. An allegory about political power and the fall of empires, “The Tower” was written in the aftermath of World War I, although Hofmannsthal continued to work on it for nearly a decade. It’s a long play, modeled on an earlier work by the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón, about a king who keeps the son who has been prophesied to overthrow him locked up in a tower.

Schlocker has radically shortened the play, and the actors (joined onstage by three musicians) play multiple roles, except for Lisa Stiegler, who gives a bloodcurdling, affecting and acrobatic performance as the imprisoned prince, Sigismund. Sumptuous as the play’s language is, it’s a difficult work to make tick dramatically. Schlocker’s deep cuts speed things up (the show clocks in at a mere 100 minutes), though it feels disjointed at times. But the grotesque, ghoulish aesthetic she devises, while effective in places, can seem just baffling and quirky in others.

For a shocking and refreshing dose of eccentricity, turn to Claus Peymann’s delirious production of Thomas Bernhard’s equally insane play, “The German Lunch Table,” at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Bernhard, who died in 1989, was the bad boy of postwar Austrian literature, and he loved to thumb his nose at his compatriots for maintaining that they were Hitler’s first victims. For this production of Bernhard’s 1988 play, a vaudeville-like series of seven sketches, Peymann has teamed up with Achim Freyer, who designed the colorful, eye-popping sets and projections.

The Josefstadt Theater is known for conventional (and conservative) dramatic fare, but this bonkers staging of a play that seems hellbent on offending its audience is anything but. Bernhard’s sketches all deal with Nazism surfacing in quotidian interactions and with society’s failure to work through the past. In one, politicians who are contestants on a TV quiz show brag about being “National Socialists at heart.” In another, elderly couples gather to celebrate the acquittal of a friend who was on trial for crimes against humanity committed at a Nazi concentration camp.

As luck would have it, “The German Lunch Table” is in repertoire at the theater along with the first German-language production of “Leopoldstadt.” That Stoppard’s haunting ode to the vanished Viennese Jewish world should play alongside Bernhard’s incendiary indictment of postwar Austrian repression and hypocrisy feels appropriate, in a sly and mischievous way.

Effingers. Directed by Jan Bosse. Through Feb. 3 at the Münchner Kammerspiele.
Der Turm. Directed by Nora Schlocker. Through Jan. 18 at the Residenztheater Munich.
Der deutsche Mittagstisch. Directed by Claus Peymann. Through March 27 at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna.